Top 68 Thomas L. Friedman Quotes
#1. French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.
Thomas L. Friedman
#2. It requires a public awakening, establishment of political will, resetting of priorities, sacrifice for the future, and an alliance of governments, businesses, and citizens.
Thomas L. Friedman
#3. The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well.
Thomas L. Friedman
#4. But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?
Thomas L. Friedman
#5. So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist ... If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.
Thomas L. Friedman
#6. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
Thomas L. Friedman
#7. It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light. A
Thomas L. Friedman
#8. today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations.
Thomas L. Friedman
#9. Today more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all.
Thomas L. Friedman
#10. Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives. My
Thomas L. Friedman
#11. Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.
Thomas L. Friedman
#12. How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.
Thomas L. Friedman
#13. Today's workers need to approach the workplace much like athletes preparing for the Olympics, with one difference. They have to prepare like someone who is training for the Olympics but doesn't know what sport they are going to enter,
Thomas L. Friedman
#14. Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of the "self-directed consumer", because the internet and all the other tools for the flat world had created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price, experience, and service he or she wanted.
Thomas L. Friedman
#15. To learn how to learn, you have to love learning - or you have to at least enjoy it - because so much learning is about being motivated to teach yourself.
Thomas L. Friedman
#16. No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
Thomas L. Friedman
#17. We have grown addicted to our high salaries, and now we are really going to have to earn them, the CEO said.
Thomas L. Friedman
#18. When I asked the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, "Is God in cyberspace?" he joked at first that God must be in cyberspace because every time he is in the London subway, "I hear people saying into their cell phones, 'Oh God, why doesn't this work!'" Here
Thomas L. Friedman
#19. At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber than any media tool we've ever had.
Thomas L. Friedman
#20. When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.
Thomas L. Friedman
#21. One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn't mean he isn't buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal. The
Thomas L. Friedman
#22. It is so easy to demonize free-market and the freedom to outsource and offshore because it is so much easier to see people being laid off in big bunches, which makes headlines, than to see them being hired in fives and tens by small and medium-sized companies, which rarely makes news.
Thomas L. Friedman
#23. One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It
Thomas L. Friedman
#24. Rabbi Marx pointed out to me that there is a verse in Isaiah that says, "You are my witness. I am the Lord,
Thomas L. Friedman
#25. The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.
Thomas L. Friedman
#26. Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.
Thomas L. Friedman
#27. In other words, he explained, unless we bear witness to God's presence by our own good deeds, He is not present.
Thomas L. Friedman
#28. In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.
Thomas L. Friedman
#29. I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don't let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies.
Thomas L. Friedman
#30. With so many generous friends and family members from so many places for so many years, how could I not still be an optimist? Thomas
Thomas L. Friedman
#31. We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we're done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.
Thomas L. Friedman
#32. Development is a voluntary process. You need a positive decision to make the right steps, but it starts with introspection.
Thomas L. Friedman
#33. On local city councils being effective: The job of the council is to get together and debate and discuss. But you do it in a way that preserves the relationships so that we can get together next week and do it again.
Thomas L. Friedman
#34. LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison,
Thomas L. Friedman
#35. People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.
Thomas L. Friedman
#36. The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or national level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to thrive within it.
Thomas L. Friedman
#37. A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.
Thomas L. Friedman
#38. Some would ask what country am I from? We ara supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said the country next to Pakistan.
Thomas L. Friedman
#39. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire
Thomas L. Friedman
#40. No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within.
Thomas L. Friedman
#41. When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.
Thomas L. Friedman
#43. Virulence is the sound of a self-selecting community talking to itself and positively reinforcing itself with no obligation to answer to anyone or look anyone in the eye.
Thomas L. Friedman
#44. No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do ...
Thomas L. Friedman
#45. That's right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers.
Thomas L. Friedman
#46. If you want to solve a big problem, you need to go from taking credit, to sharing credit, to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit. Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership. And the byproduct is both resilience and propulsion.
Thomas L. Friedman
#47. Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.
Thomas L. Friedman
#48. Over the past decade, American youth are spending much more time watching TV, listening to music, using a computer and playing video games
a total of 7 1/2 hours every day in front of a screen. The only thing they are spending less time on is reading!
Thomas L. Friedman
#49. This ain't no cloud, folks! And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source "the cloud," this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it "the supernova" - a computational supernova. The
Thomas L. Friedman
#50. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed
Thomas L. Friedman
#51. never, ever say to someone in need: "Call me if you need help." If you want to help someone, just do it. Our
Thomas L. Friedman
#52. It generated horrific noises that sound like a TRex trapped in a tar pit screeching its dying screams.
Thomas L. Friedman
#53. In the hyperconnected world, there is only "good" "better" and "best,
Thomas L. Friedman
#54. Everything I've ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.
Thomas L. Friedman
#55. Almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools. So it can be done.
Thomas L. Friedman
#56. Tencent, and Alibaba, the flow of crowdfunding through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe,
Thomas L. Friedman
#57. The supernova is enabling a deeper revolution that is just beginning, spurred by learning platforms such as Udacity, edX, and Coursera, that will change the very metabolism and shape of higher education and, one hopes, lift the adaptability line in the way that
Thomas L. Friedman
#58. Our employee engagement surveys showed a 30 percent improvement in lost sick days in one year. People are calling in sick less because they are feeling more empowered, more of a sense of ownership, and more connected." Jump-Starting
Thomas L. Friedman
#59. in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn't even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space,
Thomas L. Friedman
#60. Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.
Thomas L. Friedman
#61. It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.
Thomas L. Friedman
#64. On any given day, according to UPS, 2 percent of the world's GDP can be found in UPS delivery trucks or package cars.
Thomas L. Friedman
#65. The saying in China is If you're one in a million, there's still 1,300 people just like you.
Thomas L. Friedman
#66. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.
They all need to go on safari together.
Thomas L. Friedman
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